Divine Fury (3 page)

Those who have bothered to ask these questions have focused on a number of factors, ranging from the advent of capitalism to new notions of aesthetics to new understandings of the author and the self. There is something to be said for each of these explanations. But this book adopts a different approach, seeking to understand the genius’s emergence and subsequent flourishing in terms of two broad transformations. The first has to do with religious change, and, more specifically, with what has been described as the “withdrawal of God,” along with the disavowal and dismissal of a range of spiritual companions—spirits and angels, prophets, apostles, and saints—who had long served human beings as guardians and mediators to the divine. That dismissal was by no means uniformly accepted. But the scale was nonetheless significant and the consequences profound. For not only did it leave men and women alone in the world with their Creator; it did so at the very moment that the Creator was appearing to many to be more distant, more remote, more withdrawn, and less likely to intervene in human affairs than he had been (or so it seemed) in earlier times. To reach the realm of the sacred, to get to God—if indeed he even existed, as an emboldened minority was inclined to wonder—was more difficult than ever before. A vast space opened up, and there were no longer helpers on hand to guide human beings across the way. It was in that space that the modern genius was conceived and born.
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In assuming his modern form, the genius assumed powers that once had been reserved exclusively for God and the gods and those exalted beings—the prodigies and prophets, the angels and
genii
, the saints and great-souled men—who had long been trusted to lead us to him. Occupying the space of their classical and Christian forebears, geniuses performed a number of their functions even as they took on new roles and even when, as was often the case, they denied any explicit connection to religion at all. Geniuses served as guardians and founding fathers, saviors and redeemers, legislators and oracles of the people. Geniuses mediated between human beings and the divine. Chosen to reveal wonders, geniuses were conceived as wonders themselves, illustrating perfectly the proposition that the gradual disenchantment of the world was accompanied from the outset by its continual re-enchantment. Geniuses pulled back the curtain of existence to reveal a universe that was richer, deeper, more extraordinary and terrible than previously imagined. The baffling beauty of space-time was no different in this respect from the sublime majesty of Byron’s poetry, Beethoven’s symphonies, or Poincaré’s theorems, as radiant as an Edison light bulb or the explosion of the atomic bomb. Genius was
a flash of light, but its brilliance served to illuminate the dark mystery that surrounded and set it apart.
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Geniuses, then, were believed to possess rare and special powers: the power to create, redeem, and destroy; the power to penetrate the fabric of the universe; the power to see into the future, or to see into our souls. Detectable already in the eighteenth century at the time of the modern genius’s birth, these powers were significantly expanded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as geniuses assumed an ever greater cultural authority. Enhanced by the pervasive influence of European Romanticism, which further stylized and mystified the genius, this authority was also fortified by an extensive science of genius, which appeared to give sanction—through the measurement of skulls, the analysis of brains, and the identification of pathogens and hereditary traits—to the genius’s exceptional nature. The effort to quantify genius that culminated in the elaboration of the intelligence quotient (IQ) at the beginning of the twentieth century seemed to confirm the presence of a power—an exceedingly rare power—that scientists had assumed for over a century, and that a chorus of “genius enthusiasts” was then preaching self-consciously as a basis for worship. It was power that could be put to political ends—for the better, as some hoped, or for the worse, as others feared. The two great political religions of the early twentieth century, communism and fascism, attempted to do just that, sanctioning the legitimacy of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler by means of the religion of genius.

If broad religious transformations, and the responses to them, provide one essential context for understanding the emergence of modern conceptions of genius, the other is sociopolitical and involves the no less sweeping advent of the belief in human equality. Widely proclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic from the end of the seventeenth century, the view, as Thomas Jefferson put it famously in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal” could pass by the end of the eighteenth century as a self-evident truth. By the middle of the century that followed, it was being hailed by astute observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville as a “providential fact,” an unstoppable force that leveled all before it. And yet the assertion of equality was qualified and challenged from the start, with whole categories of human beings singled out as exceptions to the general rule. Historians have devoted close attention to these exceptions, showing how women, people of color, Jews, and others were systematically deprived of their rights in strategies of exclusion that aimed at denying some the inherent equality granted to others. But what have received less attention are the justifications used to
elevate the few above the many, granting privileges and rights beyond the norm. Jefferson himself spoke of a “natural aristocracy,” composed of individuals of talent, creativity, and intelligence, that might replace the old aristocracy of birth and blood, and many in nineteenth-century Europe would conceive of artists in a similar fashion, as beings endowed by nature with special abilities and so entitled to special privileges. Such assertions were often linked to corresponding claims of the natural inferiority of others, and together these notions formed part of a “shadow language of inequality” that accompanied the bright proclamation of the equality of all. Modern discussions of genius were most often conducted in this idiom, serving to justify new forms of hierarchy while registering a profound protest against doctrines of universal equality. Conceived as an extreme case of inherent superiority and natural difference, the genius was imagined as an exception of the most exalted or terrible kind, able to transcend or subvert the law, and to liberate or enslave accordingly.
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The evil genius, too, is a modern figure with roots deep in the past, and he is inextricably bound to his more righteous brother and twin. Both reveal traces of the sacred in their modern incarnations. And both have haunted those who have dreamed of human equality since the centuries that first proclaimed it.

The particular circumstances of the genius’s birth and subsequent development thus help to account for the predominately European focus of this book. For it was in Europe that men and women first experienced the drama of disenchantment in a significant way, a development without precedent in the whole of human history. And it was in Europe and the Americas that the doctrine of equality first gained significant traction.

But what about method and scope? Why, that is, undertake a history of genius, as this book does, as a history in ideas spanning the course of several thousand years? An alternative approach would be to dispense with gestation altogether and begin directly with the birth, commencing at the moment when modern genius first saw the light and was quickly put to use. The approach has much to recommend it—for some time it has been the industry standard among historians studying ideas in context—and in the present case it would undoubtedly have simplified the task. And yet, despite the claims of some in the eighteenth century, few ideas—even ideas of genius—emerge from nothing, ex nihilo, without any precedents at all. To begin at the “beginning” would be to do no such thing and would also run the risk of overlooking continuities, connections, and departures that a broader sweep stands a chance of taking in.

Another approach would be to follow the history of the word “genius,” which, after all, stretches back to the Romans. Or, better yet, to go in search of analogues to modern geniuses in the past. If the creature in question is ultimately the brilliant, creative individual widely recognized for unmatched talents and skills, doesn’t it make sense to seek out the modern genius’s historical counterparts—the poets and scientists, the statesmen and artists, in a word, the “geniuses”—who came before? That thought, too, has much to recommend it, as does tracing the history and genealogy of the word, and both approaches will be given due attention here. But just as critics rightly caution that words and concepts are not things, there are also strong reasons for resisting the temptation to write the history of genius as a moving tableau of eminence, a historical pantheon of geniuses
avant la lettre
. In the first place, such history has been written before—many times. Indeed, virtually all history composed until the twentieth century represents one variation or another on the dominant theme of outstanding individuals—great men, far less often great women, of deed and thought—who were said to have shaped the world and everything in it. The shortcomings of such an approach have been chronicled ad nauseam (without, it seems, hurting the sales of biographies)—so much so that it is refreshing to see scholars take up the history of the “great” in new ways. I attempt to do some of that in this book, paying close attention to the many stellar individuals who embodied ideas of human greatness before the modern genius was born.
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Yet there is one other, even stronger, reason to be wary of the effort to write the history of genius exclusively as the history of eminent achievement. Not only would such an approach risk repeating much that has been said before, it would risk anachronism, envisioning the past through the perspective of a type—the modern genius—who only comes into being in the eighteenth century. Before that time, there were no geniuses in our modern sense. And though it is undoubtedly true that the eminent artists, thinkers, poets, and sages who preceded the genius played a role in shaping the genius’s later image and reception, so did a group of less likely forebears. These were the apostles, prophets, saints, and sorcerers whom the modern genius superseded and replaced, as well as the sundry spiritual beings—the demons, angels, and
genii
—who were once held in their power. In this respect, the
genii
of the ancient world and their various Christian successors have more to do with modern genius than has been acknowledged. To focus solely on the outstanding individuals of the past who resemble the geniuses who came after them would be to miss that vital connection.

It would also be to miss what is right before our eyes. For genius is seemingly everywhere today, hailed in our newspapers and glossy magazines, extolled in our television profiles and Internet chatter. Replete with publicists, hashtags, and “buzz,” genius is now consumed by a celebrity culture that draws few distinctions between a genius for fashion, a genius for business, and a genius for anything else. If the “problem of genius” of yesteryear was how to know and how to find it, “our genius problem” today is that it is impossible to avoid. Genius remains a relationship, but our relationship to it has changed. All might have their fifteen minutes of genius. All might be geniuses now.
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In the conclusion to this book I analyze our changing relationship to genius in the aftermath of World War II in terms of its long and complex relationship to democracy and equality, pointing out that a world in which all might aspire to genius is a world in which the genius as a sacred exception can no longer exist. Einstein, the “genius of geniuses,” was the last of the titans. The age of the genius is gone. Should citizens of democracies mourn this passing or rejoice? Probably a bit of both. The genius is dead: long live the genius of humanity.

CHAPTER I

THE GENIUS OF THE ANCIENTS

E
VERY AGE, AND EVERY CULTURE
, has its heroes of the mind. The ancient Egyptians told tales of wise men, such as Djedi and Setna, who had so mastered the ancient books that they knew everything there was to know. In China, aspiring scholars performed incredible feats of learning for thousands of years, memorizing the archaic texts of the classical tradition in heroic cultural acts. In India, Japan, and Tibet, Hindu Brahmins and Buddhist monks astonish to this day with their mental gymnastics, reciting sutras and vedas with perfect recall for days on end. Jewish tradition celebrates the mental dexterity of rabbis who can put a pin through a page of Torah and say, without looking, what letter it pricks, just as Muslims take pride in the
mufti
or
ulama
who can recite every verse of the Koran. And many of these traditions possess analogues to the great African bards—the
griots, doma
, and “masters of knowledge,” living libraries who aspire to gather all that is known in their heads, preserving in oral tradition what would otherwise be forgotten.
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For those of us who find it hard to remember our anniversaries or where we left our keys, such examples serve as painful reminders of our own inadequacies. But they also illustrate nicely the simple fact that intelligence knows no bounds. Whatever the vagaries of the statistical laws that distribute human aptitude across time and space, they pay little heed to nation, culture, or race. Many in the West long denied these basic continuities, boasting, as some do still, of an inherent superiority of mind. But this book defends no such claims, even (and especially) when it tries to understand them. In short, if we take genius to mean exceptional intelligence or high IQ, great learning, performance, or presence of mind, then “the genius” is both a creature of all seasons and a citizen of the world.
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